Wednesday, January 25, 2012

Bots were added to the mech fighting game Coldest. If you would like to help playtest the game together with the developer, follow the project's news feed (there will be an announcement for a session sometime soon) and get the git version via:

Tuesday, January 24, 2012

Mass Blaster is one of the most intense arcade shooters for Windows and Linux. You will take control of two ships simultaneously to blast away at the invading Square Army. On your left, take down enemies with the red n' rad Trigerus. On your right, command the cool blue Pythagora to wipe out your foes. Choose from 4 modes of difficulty to fight your way through 10 gutsy levels. Only those with the skills to pilot both ships at the same time will go on to become High Score Heroes.

This game shares a vein with games like Avoision and pumps adrenaline. Intended for one player, Mass Blaster plays superb with two pilots as well. Just get a keyboard emulator and a joystick to avoid key locking.

Code is under GPL, while all other assets are under the not-so-free CC-BY-NC.

Monday, January 23, 2012

It's been big news online lately that MegaUpload was shut down. Along with it, many of the other annoying, wait-60-seconds-and-fill-in-this-captcha-or-upgrade-to-premium file sharing services have stopped offering public downloads. A lot of people are understandably upset about this, since in the case of MegaUpload, they don't even have access to their own files anymore.

This blog post isn't about whether it was right for MegaUpload to be shut down. There's plenty of debate going on about that, and it's something that I'm not personally interested in taking part in. What we do know is that there were a substantial number of people using MegaUpload to distribute pirated media, and, let's be honest: a lot of people are pissed off because piracy just got a lot harder. If you're one of those people, and you're angry and suddenly in search of ways to entertain yourself in the wake of the big shutdown, this post is for you.

You may have already realized that to some extent piracy creates buzz about media. If people enjoy a movie or a game or an album or whatever, they talk about it, and the word gets out, even if the person doing the talking pirated it. This is not a justification for piracy, mind you. If someone wants to make content and then threaten to send you to jail for using it the wrong way, that's their prerogative under copyright law. On the other hand, people and companies who do that don't deserve your business, and they don't deserve the buzz that you create by talking about their media. This is particularly true given the fact that they're spending the money you give them to curtail your freedoms through draconian legislation and copyright treaties.

Ask yourself this, dear reader: Do I need the RIAA to tell me what music I ought to like? Do I need the MPAA to tell me what movies to like? Do I need crappy, DRM-loving, morally-bankrupt game studios like EA to tell me what games to like? I mean, seriously, have you seen big budget movies lately? Most of them are complete lowest-common-denominator tripe. As intelligent individuals, we can do better than that.

There's an awful lot of media out there released for free (or at least very cheaply in some cases), directly by the artists, musicians, cinematographers, and game studios that make them. Some people like to argue that piracy doesn't harm anyone if you never would have paid anyway; I would contend that by pirating big budget, mass-market crap, you're hurting dedicated artists who are releasing their work for free, because the time you spend finding a pirated copy of whatever it is you want to download could have been spent discovering and talking about their works.

Even better, you could spend some of that idle time creating entertainment rather than just being entertained. If you haven't worked on your own art, music, movies, or game projects, I would strongly encourage you to try it out. Creating entertainment for other people to enjoy and getting their feedback on it can be immensely satisfying. As an honest aside here, even a brief browse through open media libraries will make it obvious that movies are by far the weakest link in this chain, followed by games. Music, being easy now for individuals or bands to produce on a large scale at home with a few hundred dollars worth of equipment, is by far the strongest. If regular people like us are willing to spend the time helping to create games and movies, we can close the gap. It'll take time, but if we can pull it off, it'll be worth it.

Media doesn't have to come from a feeding tube. Go out, look around, and see the world. There's a lot more out there than the big studios would like you to believe. And while it's not yet equal in some ways (special effects, etc) to the big budget stuff, your interest and contributions can help it get there, and at the same time help render the big studios and their anti-consumer copyright laws irrelevant. The big studios may, to some extent, be able to make it more difficult to pirate their content. What they cannot do is force us to give them money -- we can always choose not to watch their stuff.

If you have other sites to add to this list, drop me a line and I'll add them. In the meantime, go discover something. :)

P.S. If you agree with this, tell people about it. Retweet, reblog, upvote, +1, whatever. I can talk about this all day, but we need a real movement if this is going to change anything, and that means we need people to be aware.

Friday, January 20, 2012

Traction Edge is a story driven, turn based strategy game set in a Steampunk Victorian England. Gameplay is similar to the Gollop Brothers UFO or Lasersquad series in that you have "Action Points" to spend during your turn. The game also borrows heavily from roguelikes in both look and feel.

Traction Edge is currently under development and is considered alpha software. It is playable but limited. v0.2 was released for the Annual Roguelike Release Party 2011. It is distributed as source only and requires SFML 1.6 (not 2.0) and cmake to build.

Current Features:

Turn based gameplay

2-4 member squad teams

Destructable terrain

Victorian Steampunk setting

SFML based, rescalable on the fly, 16x16 graphical tiles.

Planned Features:

16-20 static levels with full story arc

Random content, procedural maps

Procedural tech tree

Civilians

Z-levels

You can keep track of all development activity using this feed. The Linux distro that I use doesn't support SFM 1.6 any more, which makes me unable to test this interesting sounding and looking squad tactics game.

Tuesday, January 17, 2012

Most important news for me: real Linux support out of the box now ;)
But there are also a few other nice changes, like additional tileset and units etc. The game also has its own master-server now, thus not depending on the Megaglest one any longer.

Sunday, January 15, 2012

As reported previously, the release of the Tremulous "reboot" TremZ has been pushed back to Spring 2012 and with news of their project lead "Volt" having stepped down due to burn-out, things don't look too bright for that date either...

I have to say that I am really impressed by most of their artwork so far, and last time I asked they assured me that it will be almost completely licensed under the CC-by-SA (with a sad exception of a few audio works that will be CC-by-SA-NC upon request by the creator).

So I hope I will not be proven wrong when saying: TremZ will the THE FOSS game of 2012 :)

Saturday, January 14, 2012

Looks pretty nice, this Darkplaces based game, doesn't it? And you can download a RetroBlazer alpha demo now... take it with a grain of salt though as my intuition tells me that this is probably planned to be a commercial release based on a FOSS engine like SteelStorm. While this is of course not bad in general (in fact personally I think there should be more FOSS based commercial games), I always get a lot of flak in the comments for posting about games with un-Free media or such ;)

On a side-note however (after playing the demo for a short while) I have to say that it is a bit too retro for me (no proper mouse aiming? is it like 1996?). I was hoping for more of a hybrid than a strait Doom reimplementation ;)

GemRB 0.7.0 was released recently. Their wiki received a clean-up as well. The engine re-implementation runs on Android and iOS. BG, TotSC, BGII, ToB, IWD and HoW can be played start to end. Some features are missing and there are some new features too.

Saturday, January 07, 2012

As the FPS resident gamer here at FreeGamer (I am playing usually under the nick poVoq btw ;) ) I am keeping you up to date to the newest FPS updates:

Hot of the press: the cosmic edition (1.2) of Red Eclipse was just released; Lots of new maps and feature additions (and they toned down that annoying hit-sound a bit). Sadly their trailer-contest has not resulted in a cool video yet that I could post here, so take this opportunity to make a cool one ;)

Another new release (7.53) comes from the AlienArena guys, which seem to have made some nice updates to their engine to speed up the performance on higher settings.

Tuesday, January 03, 2012

Bits & Bots is a real-time puzzle game about figuring out the codes to moving robots around and get them to their targets most efficiently. It comes with binaries for 32/64bit Linux and Windows. Gpl code, by-sa art.

Piles replace Stockpiles. Everything is allowed and containers get automatically shuffled to where they are needed.

Diseases will weaken and eventually kill your population if you don’t do anything about a growing population.

Migratory animals will sometimes cross the map

The spawning pool expands and spreads corruption in a smoother way, it’s improved from the abrupt way it was before.

Cowardly creatures can now also panic if they encounter another panicking creature

Death messages have been improved to give a bit more information, and a bit of variety has been added to them as well.

Constructions strobe under the cursor now, to better visualize where one stops and another one begins.

Portable mode. Just create a file named goblin-camp.portable in the directory where GC is installed and it’ll store all the files it needs in a sub-directory in that folder, instead of in the operating system’s default folder.